Need help understanding the shell help options

I face very often the problem to understand a syntax of Shell commads help which i usually get usi开发者_JAVA技巧ng options --h or -h or /? etc. when there are more than 2 or 3 options.

What does this form called? any help docs or links which explain the help syntax are welcome.

whats the difference between [ options ] and { options } what does the * or the | mean and how do i use it? how important is the order of the options usually? please provide me some good links to documentation about this.

The commands given to a CLI (Command line interface) shell are often in one of the following forms:

• [doSomething] [how] [toFiles]
• [doSomething] [how] [sourceFile] [destinationFile]
• [doSomething] [how] < [inputFile] > [outputFile]
• [doSomething] [how] | [doSomething] [how] | [do Something] [how] > [outputFile]

this was taken from this article guess it doesnt answer exactly the question but its very relevant, take a look at the "Anatomy of a shell CLI"-section.

Here you can find a good documented help with examples for each command.